A five-day group art exhibition titled PSA: Beyond the Gaze is under way at the La Galerie Alliance Francaise de Dhaka.
On Thursday, artist and critic Mustafa Zaman and critic Moinuddin Khaled attended the event as special guests at the inaugural day.
Artists Ashima Raizada, Jatin Gulati , Ritika Sharma , Kunga Tashi Lepcha, Rinoshan Susiman, Aniruddha Sarkar and Arshadul Hoque Rocky have displayed their artworks in the exhibition.
In partnership with the Alliance Francaise de Dhaka in Bangladesh and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi in India, the exhibition is displacing pieces from the PSA: Beyond the Gaze 2023–2024 workshop, supported by Photo South Asia, an initiative of the MurthyNayak Foundation, said a press release.
The exhibition followed by a six-month workshop, led by Soumya Sankar Bose, Ashfika Rahman and editing reviewed by Tanvi Mishra, welcomes young photographers and lens-based artists from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
This workshop engages participants in discussion that explores photography as a social tool, dedicating to exploring different narratives from individual and collaborative vantage points. Participants are challenged to create a different narrative – one that not only records but also addresses a deep understanding of possibilities, where the entire community is included as collaborators.
The exhibition raises question, ‘What makes our lives intimate? What forms do our bonds take within the structures of this world? What interlinks us with one another? Within familiar spaces, what isolates us? What keeps us together, and how do we part ways?’
A testament to our times in which legacies, identities, gazes, norms, systems and selves are conceived beyond set notions, artists in this exhibition ruminate over these provocations sieving through lived experiences, family histories, state narratives, tell-tales, myths and collective memories.
Practitioners from parts of Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka have presented stories of their dispositions through works that share common ground of the present.
The exhibition will be open to all till Monday.
